![]() ![]() ![]() With apologies to Star Wars fans, Alec Guinness’s finest hour comes as John le Carré’s world-weary spook, George Smiley, in a magisterial espionage drama that spawned a barely-less-brilliant sequel in Smiley’s People (1982). Or just enjoy Isiah Whitlock Jr saying ‘ Sheeeeeeeit! ’ a lot, like these guys. Watch it as a violent odyssey along America’s social fault lines or a show about technology where crappy burners still trump hi-tech gadgets. The casting is on point throughout its vast ensemble, with a young Michael B Jordan and a Londoner called Idris Elba grabbing the attention, and the late Michael K Williams cool AF as one-man crime wave Omar Little, a queer icon in a genre hardly known for them. Aside from the shaky final season, which cleaves closest to the showrunner’s own experiences at The Baltimore Sun, it’s hard to pick between its runs, such was the consistent quality of the writing of Simon, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and co pulled off (the docks-set season 2 has its naysayers, but we’re not among them). McNulty, Bunk, Lester, Kima, Prez, Herc…when season 5 wrapped, the messy but dedicated surveillance cops (plus sidekick Bubbles) in David Simon’s crime opus proved harder to say goodbye to than one of those dingy Baltimore dive bars. Walter has done everything he was supposed to do: working two jobs, paying his bills and sharing his chemistry knowledge with generations of bored teens, but a cancer diagnosis still leaving him needing to pick between the ruin of family or that of his soul. But while Breaking Bad is, of course, a morality tale – a Faust riff – its political edge is sharp enough to cut yourself on. Their arc heads only one way, but backdropped by a parched New Mexico desert that slowly fills up with shallow graves, it’s an extraordinary ride, balancing light and darkness with enough dexterity and dark humour (the bath tub! The fly!) to provide respite from the moral decay. Terminally ill chemistry teacher Walter White (the revelatory Bryan Cranston) and druggy deadbeat Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul, its tragic soul) are creator Vince Gilligan’s cooly calculating yin and sketchy, insecure yang as they slowly build a meth empire. ‘You know the business, and I know the chemistry.’ And so begins the unholiest of on-screen partnerships and, for our bag of non-sequential bills, the greatest TV show in the history of the medium. □ The best TV and streaming shows of 2023 (so far) Here’s what we chose as the best of the best. While this list is dominated by 21st century programs, there are hundreds of shows from the pre- Sopranos era that deserve credit for pushing TV forward into its current golden age. Even then, it proved to be an exhausting task – after all, television has been popular since after World War II. For that reason, we elected to limit the field a bit, leaving off talk shows, docuseries, variety shows and sketch comedy, instead focusing on scripted, episodic dramas, comedies and miniseries. ![]() That makes selecting the 100 greatest TV shows much more of a challenge than it would have been 20 years ago. The premiere of The Sopranos in 1999 is credited as the big bang that changed TV’s reputation, and the advent of streaming has made it so viewers actually have more to watch than anyone could possibly consume in an entire lifetime. The best shows compete with movies for cultural positioning, while elite filmmakers make movies for the small screen. Now, 70 or so years after it became widely available, other mediums are having to play catch up. The fact that it was being beamed directly into your home, and you had little choice in what to watch, made it seem worse. Was that perception justified? Maybe, at times. ![]() For decades, television was maligned as one of the lowest forms of entertainment available, a conduit for hypnotising slop was actively making the populace dumber. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |